


The Migration of Birds

by mystivy



Category: Tennis RPF
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-30
Updated: 2020-05-30
Packaged: 2021-03-03 00:28:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,890
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24455929
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mystivy/pseuds/mystivy
Summary: After some international travel restrictions have been eased, Roger decides to go to the RNA to shake the rust off his tennis.
Relationships: Roger Federer/Rafael Nadal
Comments: 16
Kudos: 97





	The Migration of Birds

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to Adi who read through this for me.

Don’t be stupid, Tony said to me, but I said to him, who’s the boss around here? And I laughed because he shook his head the way I do when Leo gets crazy and tries to climb the banisters instead of the stairs. Maybe it’s crazy. I text Rafa: _Rafa, I want to come to your Academy. Shake the rust off. What do you think?_ He answers about seventeen minutes later, which is quite good for Rafa when he’s at home in Mallorca, and he says, _Yes! Of course. When you come?_ I call him up, then, because it’s easier, and I tell him I can come any time. He says not to bother booking a hotel, he’ll arrange everything. Text him the details of when I’m going to arrive in Palma. Just me, or the family, too? Just me, I tell him, and he says _good_ , and I tell him I’ll get tested and then I’ll arrange the jet and I’ll text him with the arrival details soon.

It’s so good to be getting away. We’ve all had enough of each other. Mirka is taking the girls to Cannes for a while, where they can chill on a private beach and go social-distance shopping, and my parents are taking the boys to their place in Zurich. A nanny with each group. Go, Papa, they said to me, when I asked the kids if it was okay if I went. They’re sick of me, I think. They laughed at my jokes when all this started. No one laughs at my jokes anymore. Rafa will. Rafa thinks I’m funny. Oh my _god_ , Roger, Mirka said, when I cracked a joke about flying south for the summer, like a backwards goose. Whatever. It was funny.

It’s like flexing forgotten muscles just to pack my bags, and even more to get to the airstrip and get on the jet. Seve offered to come with me, and Dani, but I said this wasn’t about getting match fit. It’s just about getting back to it again, you know. Rafa has physios at the Academy. Pierre said he’d send me training videos and I’ll probably do them. Some of them. The feeling of take-off is a rush, I’m telling you, after so long on the ground. We veer around Zurich and then head south, over Italy, France and the sea, and there it is, I can see it, the sandy rock jutting out of endless turquoise. It’s like heaven, like someone dropped a part of heaven right here in the Mediterranean.

I don’t have to go through the main part of the airport, flying privately. They just take my temperature when I come down the steps of the plane and tell me to wear a mask. Of course, I’ve been wearing a mask for the whole flight, just like the crew. I look around, expecting a car at the hangar on the private strip, but it’s not just a car. It’s him. He came for me himself and my heart does a flip at the sight of him. “Oh my god,” I tell him, dumping my bag on the ground. “It’s been too long.” He’s wearing a mask, too, but I can still see the way his eyes crinkle up when he smiles.

“Roger,” he says, and he shrugs as if he’s decided throw caution to the wind and he hugs me tight. He feels so good, he smells like sunshine and air, my eyes feel better just looking at him. “Come on,” he says, disentangling himself from me. 

“Okay,” I say, following him to his car. Someone picked up my bag and put it with the others in the trunk. He’s driving his Mercedes today.

“Holy shit,” I say, as he pulls out onto the road. “I feel like it’s been a year since I saw you.” We both peel off our masks and shove them into our pockets for washing. 

“Yes, it feels so long, no?” he says. His accent is strong, the way it always is when he’s been home a while. “Have you been training?”

“A bit,” I tell him. “Not as much as you. You make me feel guilty with all your videos on Facebook, huh?” He laughs because he can tell I was making a joke. I knew he’d laugh at my jokes.

“I give the people what they want,” he says, and now it’s him cracking a joke, one eyebrow raised at me, and it’s me lost to giggles. How does he always do this to me? We’re not in the car five minutes and already I’m laughing and slapping his arm.

“Is your hotel open?” I ask, taking the bottle of water he indicates in the glove compartment. 

“No,” he says. “Not gonna be open probably for more months. I want the place to be safe for the kids, no?”

That’s Rafa to the core. Always thinking about what’s best for other people. “Is that where I’m staying?”

“No, no, no,” Rafa says. “I got a better place for you, no? In my garden.”

“I’m sleeping in your garden?”

He glances at me again with that eyebrow and I lose it, and he waits for me to stop laughing again to tell me, “No, you’re sleeping in my guest house, no? In my garden, by the sea. It’s close to the Academy. We can go there together every day.”

“I’m staying in your guest house?” I say to him. I was expecting the hotel, or a rental close by, like when I came here for the opening of the Academy. I didn’t think I’d be staying in his guest house. 

“Yeah,” he says, as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “So you can be in my bubble.” I guess he means the social bubbles we’re still supposed to be maintaining. It makes sense.

The drive from Palma Airport should be under three hours long, but Rafa manages to make it half an hour longer because he drives like a granny. I don’t say anything, though, because I don’t care. I get to see this island again and I get to talk to him, and once we stop at a rest stop to take a piss and he buys two Coke Zeros and two double chocolate Magnums, one each for him and for me. We eat them in the car with the a/c on and only when he’s finished, with the stick neatly wrapped in a tissue and put into the little holder in the doorhandle, does he pull back out on the highway again. He’s got a little chocolate on his lip. I tell him and he licks it off.

It’s early evening by the time he pulls into his house in Porto Cristo. It’s part of a complex of houses that belong to the whole family. Sometimes I think that he’d be appalled by the way Swiss people live, with separate houses for different family members. My parents have an apartment at my house, but they don’t live there all the time. I think we’d go crazy, being under each other’s feet constantly. Here, it’s the Nadal way of life. Rafa takes two of my bags and I heave my racket bag onto my back and haul out my wheelie case and follow him inside. He brings me into the main house and down a little corridor, and he opens a door at the end and says, “Here it is.”

There’s a living room inside. “Here’s what?” I ask him. “Oh, wait. This is the guest house?”

“Yeah,” says Rafa, as if I’m a bit slow. 

“Oh!” I say. “I don’t know why, I didn’t expect it to be attached to the house. Is this really in your garden, if it’s attached?”

Rafa points out the windows on either side of the living room, garden visible through both. “In my garden,” he repeats, and he makes me laugh again with his eyebrow. We’ve already spent almost the whole trip laughing about one thing or another, when I wasn’t saying how much I loved the different mountains here. Honestly I think it was just a relief for my eyes, not to be seeing endless Alpine green anymore.

I dump my racket bag near the breakfast bar and he takes me to the staircase and runs up ahead of me as I wrangle the wheelie case up behind me. Upstairs is just one open room, a huge bedroom the same size as the kitchen slash living room below, and I stop at the top of the stairs because the view, my god, the view is incredible.

“Holy shit,” I say. I can feel him looking at me, all smile and bright eyes, waiting for exactly this reaction. I can’t tell you what it feels like, that view out across the sea, like gazing across time and all eternity. Like being some kind of infinitesimal being at the top of a mountain with the entire ocean spread out below. It twinkles and undulates and I can feel it in my soul, the water, the sea. 

“Is good, no?” he says. 

Understatement of the year. “It’s amazing.”

He tears me away from it and shows me the ensuite, directing me how to use the shower, though I’ve figured out countless showers in countless hotel rooms for twenty years. I still pay attention, because it’s really nice of him. He’s got clean towels laid out for me and a new toothbrush, still in its packaging, on the counter, along with toothpastes and soaps and everything I could need. It’s all branded for his hotel, with his logo on it. He sees me eyeing it and laughs. “If you bring RF stuff, you can use it instead,” he says, grinning at me.

He wanders back into the bedroom and I follow him. “You wanna get settled in? Then come for a swim, stretch the muscles?” He brings me downstairs again and opens the sliding doors out to the garden, where, in the middle of a paved patio, the pool is glimmering and tempting. 

“A swim sounds like heaven,” I say. “Give me ten minutes?”

“Sure,” he says. “I’ll go change. Meet you out there. There’s water in the fridge, no? And anything else you need, just go into the kitchen and take.” He gestures vaguely towards the main part of the house. He slaps me on the arm then and heads back out the door we came in, leaving me alone, and I stand there at the sliding door, stepping out onto the patio, just letting myself soak it all in. I’m here in Porto Cristo, I’m feeling the heat of the sun, I’m hearing the sea on the rocks just down that tumbling cliff at the bottom of the garden, I’m smelling the salt and the flowers that are growing in Rafa’s garden and the earth beneath them. I’m here, I’m here. I’m back here at last.

The pool is deliciously cool underneath the top layer of water that’s been warmed by the sun. We make quick work of churning that under, as we mess around and race from one end of the pool to the other. We’re fairly evenly matched in the water. He’s got the practice, I’ve got the build for it. “Where’s your family?” I ask him, as we take a breath holding on to the side for a minute.

“Oh, they’re in their houses,” he says. “Still have restrictions, no? But Maribel will come later for dinner.”

“And Mery?” I ask him. I’d expected to see her around, but I’ve seen no hint of her.

“She’ll be back later,” he says, and no more seems forthcoming on that particular topic, so I let it go. I’m glad we’re alone here, anyway. I wanted it like this. The last time I was here, for the opening of the Academy, we were in a crowd almost all the time, apart from one dinner we managed to sneak away for in a restaurant literally overhanging the sea. That place was magical. I wonder if we’ll go back there this time. I hope so, at some point.

“So what’s for dinner?” I ask him. He perks up at that, grinning. 

“I gonna cook for you,” he says. “On the barbecue. I hope you like lots of fish.”

He knows I do. “I can make a salad,” I tell him, because he knows, as well, how utterly useless I am in the kitchen, and even any salad I make is likely to come out with too much lettuce and too little cucumber, or vice versa, so it’s pointless for me to even try. He laughs at me. I splash him and race off again, and he curses and follows me.

The sun is setting by the time we haul ourselves out of the pool. He’s so tanned compared to me, brown as a nut beside my pale Swiss skin that, for the first time in forever, hasn’t had its regular summer dose of sun. “I look like a ghost beside you,” I tell him, pulling him beside me so we can see our reflections in the big sliding door into his kitchen. 

“You’ll get tan here,” he tells me. “I’ll take you outside every day. One day after training I’ll take you out on my boat. You’ll be the same as me.”

I doubt that, since he’s got such a head start, but I’ll give it a try. “You’ll take me out on your boat?” I ask him. “I’m honoured. Only special people go out on your boat, I think.” 

He throws a grin at me that I don’t know how to decipher. “Maybe,” he says, squinting against the setting sun. “Anyway, go take a shower. Then come back down and help me cut the squids, no?”

“Okay,” I say to him, saluting and laughing a little at the way he gives me orders. He swats at my arm but I dodge him and run inside, into my little guest house in his garden.

We sit at a large table on the patio. Even though the back of the house itself faces east, this is a sun trap in the early evening. There are cicadas in the palm trees in Rafa’s garden and the sprinklers have come on in the flower beds. My fingers are covered in some kind of squid slime and I’m very slowly trying to cut it into rings like Rafa showed me. “Why don’t you buy them already cut?” I ask him, trying not to slice open a finger trying to keep the rubbery thing in place.

“This is fresh,” Rafa says, as if it’s self-evident.

“Did you catch them?” 

“No,” he says. “I buy them down there, on a pier.” He points down towards someplace I can’t see, down the coast a little. “When they come in from the boats.”

I don’t have time to respond before there’s noise in the kitchen, and then there she is, Mery, coming outside. She looks smart, like she’s just come from work. Which she probably has, I reflect. I think workplaces here are allowed twenty-five percent capacity, I read it somewhere online. “Hey,” she says, leaning down and kissing him on the cheek. I see the little mark on her nose from wearing a mask. He says something to her in Mallorquín and she shrugs and says something back. Then she comes around the table to me. “Hi, Roger,” she says. She makes that gesture that so many people make now, the socially distanced hug gesture. I couldn’t hug her anyway, with the squid slime on my hands. “How are you?”

I tell her I’m fine. We talk about the virus and agree that the last few months have been really tough, but we’re lucky, living as we do. How are the family? All this kind of thing. Then she says she’ll be back down soon and she heads back inside. I sit down again and Rafa’s finished cutting up my squid. It’s all in a bowl. 

“Now, marinade,” he says.

“How often do you cook like this?” I ask. 

“Only for special occasion, no?” he says, grinning at me as I follow him inside. His kitchen is white and has a comfortable feel, like this is where the heart of his house is. It’s open to the dining areas inside and outside, and the living room just around the corner. He’s got tea towels with maps of Mallorca on them, meant more for tourists than residents. He sees me looking at them. “A gift, no?” he says. “From the local businesses and things.” He doesn’t go into it, but I know the kind of thing he means. In Switzerland they’ve given me two cows.

I help him mince chilis and mix a marinade, then we leave the squid in a bowl in the fridge. We wash fresh mackerel in water and he says he’s not going to do anything with them but barbecue them and serve them with lemons. He gives me a knife and a bowl and tells me to cut the lemons into wedges, which I manage to do without slicing any fingers open, while he starts to cook rice with onions and saffron and some other secret things. It’s obvious from the way he moves around his kitchen that he cooks a lot, even if this kind of big spread is just for special occasions. It’s nice, to be honest, to feel like a special occasion for him. I cover the bowl with saran wrap and he sets me to chopping more things, this time for a green salad. “Don’t worry,” he tells me. “I’ll tell you exactly what to do.” He’ll make a chef of me yet.

At some point he takes out two bottles of beer and uncaps them both without even asking me, but of course I’ll take one. The evening has gone pale, now, a haze over the sea, the orange of the sun over towards the west, the darkness creeping up from the horizon. I can smell the dew on the dry earth and the grass, evaporating off the patio stones that are still warm to the touch. The chorus of cicadas is in full swing. He shows me how to mix up a simple balsamic dressing and I have to say I’m proud of my efforts. Nothing compared to his, but not too bad.

Maribel arrives then. She’s into full-body hugs but we have to do the socially-distanced thing with a kind of rueful smile. More responsible. “What do you think, can my brother cook?” she asks. I’m pretty sure it’s a running joke between them.

“Look, he’s a thousand times better than me,” is all I say, holding up my hands, like I’m not gonna be part of this. She just laughs and opens Rafa’s fridge, fishing out a beer. It’s only now that Mery returns. I have to admit, I’d forgotten all about her. I was expecting her back sooner but she never showed. She hugs Maribel, because I guess they’re in the same social bubble so it’s okay. Honestly it’s weird, it’s like they’re better friends than Mery and Rafa. Then again, Rafa’s always been super private with her. I’ve never even seen them hold hands or kiss or anything like, even though he’s probably seen me like that with Mirka I don’t know how many times. We’re just not as private, I guess.

Rafa hovers near me as the Mallorquín chatter picks up, though I know that when we sit down to dinner they’ll speak in English for me. “They’re talking about their friends,” Rafa says, as if it’s unimportant. He quirks his shoulder a bit to indicate that I should follow him out to the patio. “Help me light the barbecue.”

Rafa uses real charcoal in his barbecue, so he has to light it carefully. He arranges the coals and sets it up the way he wants it, with shelves at various levels and a couple of cast iron skillets to one side, and then holds the nozzle of a long-nosed lighter to little lighter logs. “It takes time to heat up,” he says, as we see little flames appear among the coals. 

“You don’t use gas?” I ask him.

“I like the taste from this,” he says. “On my boat I use gas. Here, in my home, no rush, no? Can take care of the fire like this.” He takes two chairs from the table and sets them beside the barbecue so while he pokes at the fire and nurtures the coals, we can talk to each other and slowly finish our beers.

It’s just the four of us for dinner, no one else, the times being what they are. And actually, it’s really nice to sit around the table eating Rafa’s excellent fish and rice and salad. He can cook, I tell you that. He keeps saying to me it’s simple, not like complicated cooking, but it tastes amazing and that’s what matters, isn’t it? His parents are proud of him doing these normal things, I can tell that about them. We sit around talking after we’re full, still picking at the salad—the mackerel and the squid are gone—and Rafa pours us wine. Not too much for him and me, though. “We go to the Academy tomorrow,” he says to me. “Don’t sleep late.” 

“Ugh,” I say, but then I take it back. “Wait, no kids, just us in the morning? Do you eat breakfast out here?”

“We can,” he says, shrugging a little.

“Oh my god, actually it sounds like heaven. If I don’t wake up, come in and get me. I love my kids, but tomorrow’s gonna be the first morning in… I don’t even know how long, when I get to have a quiet morning.”

Everyone laughs at me. They don’t know what it’s like, running after four kids all the time. “You’ll see,” I say to him, and he laughs and shrugs again and takes a long mouthful of wine.

The morning is as beautiful as I imagined. I’m just realising now how much I missed the sea. Sure, I’m Swiss, and we’re mountain people, used to jagged peaks and trees and the only water we know is rivers and lakes, but all year round I travel and it’s rare along the way that we don’t see the sea. Melbourne, Dubai, Miami, Monte Carlo, Rome, New York, there’s sea near all of them. And then there’s the Maldives and Sardinia, where we go on holiday. I haven’t gone so long without seeing the sea in years. It’s like my eyes needed this, my brain. My mental health, maybe. Looking back, maybe I was a bit annoying at home. Maybe my jokes weren’t so funny. They were probably right to want to get rid of me for a little while.

“Come on,” he says, coffee cup in hand. He tells me it’s a new habit, drinking coffee, since he’s been home. He has a machine he says someone gave him as a Christmas present two years ago and he just started using it this April. He takes me into the garden, the grass still cool under our bare feet. He leads me through a little gap in the planting and towards a wall about waist-high, right along the edge of the rocks that tumble down to the sea. “Amazing, no?” There’s something deep and quiet in his voice that I feel in my soul. 

“Yeah,” I agree, equally reverent. It’s easy to stand there with him, quiet most of the time, except when he points out a bird or a kind of flower that grows in the skree along the outside base of the wall, or when he notes that the tide is coming in. He points out the rocks he always uses to judge. 

“If the wave come over like that, see, if it happens a few times like that one after the next, then the tide is coming in.” Teaching me to know these things the way he does, the island boy, grown up watching the tides.

There’s a new calm in me as I pack my gear and pick up my racket bag to head to the Academy. Rafa drives his Merc again, but he’s so slow and careful, no one could accuse him of being too flashy. We have to drive inland, but it’s not far. He’s got a parking spot for Mr. Nadal, of course, and Toni’s spot is beside his, but it’s empty. I asked after Toni last night. Rafa said he’s having to finally learn how to slow down.

Rafa shows me inside, into the locker room. The place has that feeling like a tournament venue right before the final, when places that should be loud are quiet, but there’s still a kind of echo, some feeling you can’t explain, like memories of noise. The place still looks great, I tell him, and he’s modest but pleased, I can tell. We both get our gear on and head outside to the court. 

“There’s a physio here, you can have physio after,” he tells me. 

“And you?”

“Titín gonna come for me.” 

I suddenly imagine his Titín working on me, and it seems terribly strange, those hands that are normally on Rafa’s body so intimate with mine. I shake off the image, glad Rafa’s arranged for someone else. “On court, though, just you and me? Carlos isn’t coming?”

Rafa flashes me a grin. “Just you and me.”

“We can’t play a set or anything,” I tell him. “You’ll destroy me. Look at you. You don’t even look like you’ve been off court. I’m soft and squishy compared to you.”

He laughs, his eyes screwed up, that real, genuine laugh. “Come on,” he says, gesturing to the first bench we pass beside the main court, indicating that I should put my stuff there. “You’re not soft. We’ll play a set.”

“Hmph,” I say, but it’s impossible not to feel his mood, light and happy, all smiles.

We warm up and practice for about thirty minutes before he says it’s time for a set. I knew it was inevitable, really. He’s putting me through my paces. I can’t show weakness, I tell myself, as I lean forward to catch my breath. “It’s the heat!” I tell him. “It’s not this hot in Switzerland!” He throws a tennis ball at me. I don’t do too badly in the set, though. 3-6, he beat me, but it wasn’t the trouncing I was expecting. 

“I was being nice,” he says, as we towel off after.

“Sure,” I tell him. “I know what it feels like, your forehand, and you weren’t being nice.”

Another laugh, those gorgeous crinkles around his eyes, and then he pours water over his head to cool down. He shakes it out of his hair, but it drips down his face, his cheeks, his mouth. I’ve known his face for so long, you know. He’s always there. I’ve missed this, I’ve missed him. I’ve missed his face.

We take our stuff back inside and go to the gym to warm down. Well, he calls it warm down. “This isn’t a warm down,” I say. “This is a workout.” He’s still on his bike, still dripping, sweat this time.

“When we go home, we get in the pool,” he says. “Think about it, the water. So cool.”

I do imagine it. I can’t imagine anything more blissful.

“Think about that and do ten more minutes,” he says to me.

I shake my head at him in disbelief. But then I have an idea. “Okay, only if you video me on my phone, okay? I’m gonna send this to Pierre.”

He laughs and takes my phone and videos me looking very serious, dripping with sweat on an exercise bike for the first time in months.

I do a lazy backstroke while he holds on to the side, eyes closed, kicking his legs just enough to float. It’s as blissful as I imagined. The sky is a deep blue, the kind of burned blue of hot, hot summer. There are birds flitting overhead, chirping softly to each other. Swallows, flicking and dipping through the air, acrobats, beauties, but I have to stop looking because I don’t want to hit my head against the end of the pool. I stand in the water and then do a kind of half-energised frog-kick back towards him. “Where are we eating tonight?” I ask him. We had sandwiches after we showered at the Academy—all they could offer, since the restaurant was closed—but after today’s workout, I’m already starting to get hungry again. 

“Remember the place I bring you to last time?” he says.

“The one on the rocks? Right over the sea?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh my god, that place was amazing. It’s open?”

“Yeah, like twenty five percent. I maked a reservation. I remember you like it.”

I swim up beside him and sort of float, hanging on to the side. “Is Mery coming?”

He opens one eye and glances at me before closing it again. “No,” he says. He doesn’t give any reason or explanation. That’s it. No. 

“Ohhh,” I say. I’ve realised what it must be. “You’re like me and Mirka, aren’t you? You’ve been at home together for too long. We were arguing the whole time by the end, I’m telling you.”

He laughs a little. “No, it’s not that,” he says. He doesn’t tell me what it is, though. He just folds his legs under him and kicks off from the side and starts doing handstands until water goes up his nose and he surfaces, snorting and coughing and laughing, and I forget about it and laugh, too.

After a twenty-minute nap, I get ready. I’m going to wear jeans with a white shirt. No socks, Spanish style, and neat little leather slip-ons with white soles that Uniqlo sent me. Rafa’s wearing kind of the same thing when I meet him down in the kitchen, but his shirt is pink and his shoes are brown suede loafers. “You look so Spanish,” I tell him, and he raises his eyebrow at me. I laugh, as I always do.

He’s called a driver so he can drink at the restaurant. The car is spotless and the driver is wearing mask and gloves, so it’s as safe as things can be. The restaurant is about fifteen minutes away, and when we get there it’s almost empty. “This is the first time I’ve been in a restaurant in I don’t know how long,” I tell him. 

“Same,” he says to me.

The staff are wearing masks and gloves, and we wear masks until we get to our table. It’s in a kind of alcove of its own, open out over the sea. Private and beautiful, especially when anyone else who arrives will be placed with some space between us and them. “It’s so weird,” I say, and he knows what I mean. What a strange world we live in now where we have to be this careful, this fearful.

“Well,” he says, as we open the menus. “Hopefully a vaccine soon, no?” The usual refrain these days because honestly there’s nothing else to say.

We look through the menu and order food and wine, and it’s funny how quickly things become normal. We stop noticing the masks and gloves and instead gaze out at the sea and feel its soft hush relax us. The wine is a crisp white and we share tapas to start, and then a pot of mussels and fresh bread to mop up the sauce. Rafa looks so good in the twilight, the sun down behind the hills and his face lit up by candlelight. We get juices on our fingers and on our chins, and then he makes me laugh and a little bit of it drips onto my jeans.

When they take away the pot of mussels, they ask if we’d like to see a dessert menu. We look at each other and wordlessly decide we need a bit of a break, so Rafa tells the waitress he’ll let her know when we’re ready. It’s fully dark now, nothing but candles and dim lamps lighting our table. There are a few more tables seated now, but no one nearby. Rafa’s face has taken on a more serious look, the shadow of a frown. I pour him another glass of wine.

“Look,” he says, when I sit back. “There’s something I should tell you, no?” He takes a deep breath, like there’s a pressure band around his chest and he has to try to force it outwards to get the air in. 

“What’s up?” I ask him, refilling my own glass. He won’t look me in the eye. He’s looking out at the dark sea or down at the table, straightening up his water glass. The mood has changed and I don’t know why. “Rafa?” I say, and finally he looks at me and kind of laughs a little, as if he’s laughing at his own tension. For once I’m not laughing.

“Probably I should tell you this a long time ago, no?” he says. “I wanted to, but to be honest, I didn’t know, is it fair? Is it fair to make you know a secret? It’s kind of a big one. Only my team and a few of the Spanish players know, no? But now you are in my house, my guest, and I know you already notice the strange things. So I decide to tell you.”

All this preamble and I’m still in the dark. “What are you talking about? What have I noticed?”

“With Mery, I think you notice that maybe we don’t act like a normal couple. Married, no? You see this.”

“Oh,” I says. “Yeah, I guess a bit.” I’m still puzzled, though. They’ve always been like that, shy and reticent about their relationship. I guess it’s a bit weird that they’re so distant at home, and really, on reflection, Rafa has hardly seen her during the last two days while I’ve been here. So sure, maybe it’s odd. I still don’t know what he’s driving at, though.

“The true is,” he begins, scratching at something on the tablecloth. Then he takes a big breath, sits forward, and looks me in the eyes, like he’s had to make a conscious decision to do that. “The true is,” he begins again. “Is not real, the relationship between Mery and me. It’s all...” He waves his hand in the air, making some nebulous, cloudy shape. “It’s all for the public, no? To look normal.”

I’m lost. “What?” I say, leaning forward, too. It feels like we should used hushed voices, even though no one can hear us. “What do you mean, normal?”

He screws up his face, looking for the words. “I don’t mean normal,” he says. “I mean, to look straight. Not gay.”

He’s looking straight at me now, waiting for the clues to align in my mind, and then they do, and then I say, “Ohhhhhhhh,” and lean back. This is not what I was expecting. “I see,” I say then, stupidly, trying to say anything at all, not to look like an idiot.

He nods, sitting back again, the big reveal over. I’m still reeling but for him the climax is past. “We decided a long time ago, no? Started in 2008, but we tell everyone we’re together for three years at that time. Benito arranged all the stories in the magazines and online. But actually I had a boyfriend then, so…” He shrugs. “Wasn’t true.”

“You… had a boyfriend,” I echo, trying to think back to then and if I’d seen Rafa with some guy in particular. It’s impossible, though. He’s always surrounded by guys, his core team and then others who just kind of appear or disappear. Suddenly I realise why. “Oh,” I say, still sounding stupid.

“I’m sorry,” he says, shaking his head. “I know I could have sayed to you a long time ago. You’re my friend. But it’s a lot, no? To put on someone. Ask you to keep this big secret for me. Didn’t seem like the right thing.” He regards me for a moment, his shrewd eyes taking in what’s happening in my rushing, tumbling brain. “Maybe it was the wrong thing. Maybe it would be better if I tell you years ago.”

I shake my head faintly and take a mouthful of wine to buy time. I feel kind of unmoored. “It’s fine,” I say. “It’s your decision, Rafa. A private thing, I know this. So don’t, you know, don’t second guess yourself. It’s fine.”

He nods, slowly. “Anyway,” he says. “I never thinked to play so long, no? I thinked when I have twenty-seven, twenty-eight years, I’ll retire. My knees. But then time went on and on, and I am thirty-three, and it’s time to marry or not marry, and we decide to marry.” He shakes his head. “I don’t know if it’s a good decision. Before, we were friends, she was close with me, it didn’t feel like a big lie, no? Now it feels like a lie.”

My confusion is tempered by the tone in his voice, the sadness. I stop thinking about me for a second and lean forward again, chin on my hand, and he looks up at me, half-apologetic smile on his face. “That’s shit,” I say. 

“All of these people at my wedding. The king was there,” he says, shaking his head in some kind of disbelief. “I lied to the king. Is probably a crime or something.” He coughs out a little laugh.

“You’re fucked,” I tell him, and then he softly laughs for real. “Are you… I mean, is there…” I don’t know how to put this. “Is there a real person?” He shakes his head. He’s not self-conscious anymore, he’s just looking at me. Giving me time to take it in. I nod. I’m just about to ask if Mery is with someone for real, but I realise that I don’t care about Mery. Maybe that makes me a bad person, I don’t know. I just care about Rafa, and this, and how crazy it is, and how I don’t know what this feeling is in my chest.

We end up not ordering dessert. I feel like my conversation is dried up, like I have to cast about for something, anything, to say. I’ve never felt like that with Rafa before. We were always able to talk but now I feel sort of knotted and I tell him I’m feeling kind of tired. He says he has to pee but he pays the bill, and I swat him on the arm and tell him I’ll get the next one. He smiles at me and says okay, good-natured and kind. We’re kind of quiet in the car on the way back home. I think the wine went to my head, after the long day.

He asks me if I want a last glass of wine before bed, but I tell him no. Then I hug him—of course I hug him, it’s _Rafa_ —and say goodnight and walk down the corridor into my little guesthouse. It’s dark, so I turn on a low lamp by the sofa and even though I had intended to go straight up to bed, I sit down. It has that new smell. Suddenly I feel like an interloper here in this adjunct to Rafa’s house. The room feels alien, too perfect. A throw artfully draped on the back of the sofa that no one ever sits on. A thick, cream-coloured candle on the coffee table but nothing to light it with. I’m very tired. I sit for a long time, shuffling these feelings inside me, until finally exhaustion drives me upstairs. I don’t even take a shower before falling into bed.

I call Mirka in the morning before breakfast and say hi to the girls. They already look better than they did just a couple of days ago, when I saw them last. “You got some sun,” I say to her, and she tells me they got a villa right on the beach, with their own private area of sand and sea.

“It’s perfect, Papa,” Charlene informs me. “And later today we’re going to Louis Vuitton.”

“You’re spoiled,” I say, but they know I’m only teasing. They can wear Louis Vuitton all they like, they still have to do their homework and chores.

Then I call Mami and she lets me say hi to the boys, though of course they’re charging around as usual. I’m glad Nina is with them. My poor parents can’t keep up. It’s nearly nine when I put on some shorts and a shirt and head outside. Rafa is in the kitchen, and the mingled aromas of coffee and fresh bread are wafting out into the morning air. “I baked,” he said, in that way he has of pronouncing the -ed at the end of a word. 

“I can smell it,” I say to him. He looks so bright, a creature native to these sunny mornings. “I know you hate it, but do you happen to have cheese?”

He opens the fridge door with a flourish and shows me several blocks of cheese. “Choose what you like,” he says, smiling broadly, but there’s something else there, too, like he’s gauging me, trying to figure out where we are now after last night. I do my best to smile back at him and act as normal as possible, but I suppose even that’s making things awkward. It’s impossible to try to act normal. Things are either normal or they’re not. 

We sit outside again for breakfast. “Is it always this quiet around here, or is it a corona thing?” I ask him. Before I came, I imagined his house would be a thoroughfare of Nadals and friends, though I admit I’d somehow forgotten the restrictions. Even still, given that they live all around, I thought there’d be more than this.

“Corona thing,” he tells me. “I guess we get so used to it, no? And I go to the Academy a lot, so I must be careful with my parents. For sure it’s clean and we are as safe as we can be, but I can’t accept to imagine them sick, to be honest. I tell them not to come too often, just in case.”

“But you were okay with me coming here.” The words are out of my mouth before I even think them.

He hesitates for a moment. “You said you get tested, no?” he says, by way of explanation.

“Yeah, I did, all clear,” I say, and I let it go, even though I know that he knows there were a lot of people between that test and my arrival here. I guess we were all wearing masks. “This bread is incredible,” I tell him. I’m having it with fat slices of cheese and some prosciutto he had in the fridge. He’s having his with Nutella, of course. Which he somehow gets on his cheek and even though I tell him where it is, he doesn’t get it, so I lean over and clean it off for him with my thumb. He beams at me and I am lost in him for a moment, because everything he does is the only thing he’s doing at exactly that time, so when he looks at me I know that I’m all he sees.

I’m curious, of course, and I half want to ask him things, but the questions seem roadblocked in my throat and I end up saying nothing on the drive to the Academy. I realise we’ve set no end-date on this stay. Is he going to drive me silently to the Academy every day for a week? Two weeks? A month? I didn’t think of how long when I asked him if I could come. I wasn’t imagining the leaving part. Practice is as tough as it was yesterday with the sun beating down, but I’m more focused, and this time I win the set 6-4. He wants to keep working on his serve so I just loiter about, helping to corral the balls that accumulate at one end of the court. There’s no one around. “Where are the kids?” I ask him. “From the Academy?” 

“They’re home,” he says, towelling down his face and arms. “They were here for so long, stuck because they can’t travel at that time, no? So we give them a holiday a little longer.”

This time, after we shower, Rafa shows me around a little more. “Come on,” he says. “I wanna show you something.” He takes me into the hotel and up in the elevator to the top floor, and then down to one end of the corridor. And then I see it, my logo on the door. 

“What’s this?” I ask him.

“It’s your suite,” he says, smiling expectantly. He opens the door to show me inside. It’s spacious, full of light, and far more luxurious than most of the rooms in the hotel. “Tony didn’t tell you we asked to use your logo?”

“No,” I say, racking my brain. I’m pretty sure I’d remember if he’d mentioned it. “He didn’t tell me.” I wander around, running my fingers along the mahogany sideboard, the leather-bound book full of menus and information, the high threadcount cotton sheets. 

“Look,” he says, opening the door to the ensuite. It’s marble, pale-veined and expensive, laid exquisitely under two beautiful free-standing sink basins. The fittings are gold. The shower is large, a waterfall fitting, and the jets set into the wall have different pressure settings. Perfect for sore muscles. “I thinked, if Rogi ever stays in my hotel, I want him to feel at home.”

He’s watching me and I don’t know how to feel about it, this look in his eyes. “I would feel at home here,” I say, a little awkwardly. The view is like the one from the guesthouse, and the balcony is shaded, private, with a little table for two outside. I click the latch on the sliding door and step outside, and he follows me. “This is beautiful, Raf,” I say. We’re leaning on the railing side by side, his elbow touching mine. “You really made this for me?”

“Yeah,” he says, shrugging, as if it’s nothing. As if building me a suite in his hotel is just a little thing.

“What’s it been like for you?” I ask. I don’t know what’s made me say it now, here, in the vast silence of the summer afternoon. The time when everyone around us takes a siesta.

“What?” he replies, though I get the impression it’s a stalling tactic. He rubs at a spot on the railing that isn’t anything.

“Being so secret on the tour. Having to keep yourself so secret.”

He takes a long breath. “Well,” he says. “Difficult, sometimes. Sometimes easy, no? Sometimes feels like being safe. Sometimes feels like… like I can’t have the air to breathe.”

I glance at him and he’s got a tight, pained expression on his face. “You don’t deserve that,” I say, and I mean it from somewhere deep inside me. This extraordinary man deserves a life better than one that puts that look on his face.

He shakes his head. “It doesn’t matter,” he says. “It was necessary.” He says that as if by rote, as if he’s said it a thousand times. No longer an opinion but a catechism, a principle by which he exists.

“And it was all just a story, you and Mery?”

“Yeah,” he sighs. “She is so kind, no? So good. She is my friend. At the beginning, when I begin to get famous, Benito suggest this story, like all the time for three years I had a girlfriend. He said it make it easier to be a person I already know. Most gay guys like me, maybe they date a model or actress but he said, that’s not the story we want. We want a home story. Fit with my ‘image.’” He says “image” like it’s something he finds slightly ridiculous. Suddenly a lot about Rafa’s tight-knit team and his continued employment of Benito, despite his social media lunacy, makes more sense. Benito has always struck me as a little off the rails. Between the two of us, Tony has said a few times how crazy he thinks Benito gets on Twitter. He makes hand motions, thumb and little finger stuck out, glugging as if from a bottle, like Benito tweets drunk, makes stupid comments to fans after too much wine. He’s said he doesn’t understand why Rafa keeps him on, but Rafa’s hardly going to fire the architect of his privacy.

“And what about…” I begin, with the feeling that he knows what I’m going to ask, but I hesitate anyway. Then he nods, a soft smile on his face, and I plough on. “What about boyfriends?”

“Difficult to have a boyfriend in this situation,” he says. He’s stopped thumbing at the railing and he’s turned around, his back to the sea, leaning his elbows on the top bar. “I tried a couple of times, no? Last time, we broke up, I think nearly two years ago. Together four years. He was Santiago, he’s from Palma.” I can picture this Santiago, someone handsome, tall, someone who would look beautiful beside Rafa. What a fool he was, I find myself thinking. He probably couldn’t take the secrecy. What idiot would not endure secrecy for Rafa? A small price to pay, in my opinion. Already I loathe him a little bit.

“Well,” I say, nudging Rafa with my elbow. “I’m sorry it’s so tough.”

He just shrugs lightly. “Yeah, well. Used to it, no?” 

My stomach at this moment growls audibly and I laugh, and he laughs, the tension of the conversation broken. “Come on,” he says. “I know a deli, we get take out, bring it home.”

“Sounds amazing,” I say. He goes ahead of me and I lock the sliding door and follow him. Something bubbles up inside me and I fling my arms around him from behind, pressing my face against his shoulder. “I can’t believe you built this for me,” I tell him. 

He just laughs and clasps one of my hands and says, “Come on.” He blushes, so soft and lovely. I feel a wonderful kind of easy joy as we walk back the to lobby to pick up our stuff and head out to the car.

After lunch he takes me along a walk he likes to take along the coast, in places climbing a little over the rocks, but not so much as to risk a tendon or even a graze. He guides me down to the pier where he buys his seafood, though its too late in the day for that now. “There’s a shop,” he tells me, pointing out a little row of storefronts on the coast, just back a little from a stretch of sand. “You don’t mind more seafood?”

“Are you kidding me? I’ve been living in a landlocked country for months. And I don’t know, is there something about the seafood here? It tastes better.” I’m teasing him just a little and he knows it, but his eyes light up and his face crinkles and he agrees that yes, Mallorcan seafood is the best seafood in the world.

We pick out some prawns and fish—well, okay, he does, and I just agree—and some kind of special salt they make right there in the shop to season it with, and then head back across the sand, over the rocks, the way we came. “When are you gonna take me out in your boat?” I ask him. 

He squints at me. “Tomorrow?”

“Perfect,” I say. “I can’t believe you let so many other guys on your boat and this is my first time. So unfair.”

“True,” he agrees, with a mock kind of ruefulness, both of us kidding around. “And so many friends, no? And some boyfriends.” He winks at me and I bubble with laughter, the way he always makes me laugh. 

“I bet,” I say to him. “Perfect place to hide away.”

“Yes,” he says, definitively. 

“I can’t wait,” I tell him. “I’ll even fish, if you want to fish.” Now it’s him laughing, as if he can’t imagine me with a fishing rod. “I can fish!” I protest, even though I’ve never fished before in my life.

Mery comes home from work sometime in the late afternoon and she finds us on lounge chairs on the patio, too lazy to swim. When we got home we put the fish in a bag with the salt to marinate, then we stripped off to our shorts and lay down in the sun. He slathered on sunscreen and threw me the bottle. I’ll probably burn anyway. I’m so pale. My face and arms are going a little brown because I’ve played the last couple of days outside, but the rest of me, I look like that white fish we’ve got in the fridge, I’m telling you.

She says hi to me and then kisses him on the cheek again. It seems to be a normal thing. He doesn’t mind or anything, though he doesn’t kiss her back. Then they speak in Mallorquín and I’m lost. I tried to learn a little Spanish on Duolingo during lockdown but that doesn’t help me among Mallorca natives. She gives me a little wave as she goes back in and then Rafa sort of flops his head over to look at me and says, “Just you and me for dinner. She’s going to Maribel’s.”

“That’s fine with me,” I say. “But look, Raf,” I say, turning over on one side so I can look at him properly. “I don’t want you to have to stay away from your parents because you think it’s dangerous for me to go. You don’t have to babysit me or anything.”

He waves his hand. “No, no,” he replies. “It’s fine. In four, five days, you’ll still be healthy, and then we can say, he is healthy, no sickness, and we know no coronavirus, no? So then we can have dinner together with them.”

I can feel how softly I smile at him. “You’ve got it all planned out.” He taps the side of his head, indicating his cleverness. “But Raf, if you get bored of me, you can take time off, okay? Tell me to look after myself for a day or whatever, I don’t mind.” He raises that eyebrow at me and I giggle stupidly. “What?”

“I not gonna get bored of you, Rogi,” he tells me, and then he calls me “estupido” under his breath. It’s the deadpan delivery, that’s what kills me. I swear there are tears in my eyes by the time I stop laughing. I love the guy.

He cooks pasta tonight and puts the marinated fish and the prawns in a sauce with chili and olive oil and basil. I don’t think I’ve ever tasted anything so good. I tell him if the whole tennis thing doesn’t work out, he has a great future as a chef. I mean, he already owns the restaurants. He can just cook in them. He laughs when I say that. He laughs at my jokes. It feels so easy with him, I don’t know how to describe it. He’s opened a bottle of white to go with the pasta and it’s perfect, you know? One of those perfect evenings with food and wine and the sea and candles and company. “So,” I say after a glass and a half of wine. “Have you ever been with a woman? Or only men?”

Rafa glances at me with this knowing kind of smile, like he was waiting for me to start asking this kind of thing. “No,” he says. “Only men.”

“Who was the first boy you kissed?” 

Rafa takes a mouthful of wine. “Luca Capelli,” he says, putting his glass down. “Italian boy, no? He was on holiday here with his family. He had the house next door to my friend Tomeú’s house and we hung out with him.”

He seems to think that’s all there is to say on that topic. “And?” I prompt him. I want to hear everything. 

He shrugs and laughs. “And… one night, we were out on the beach, all of us, we had a fire, no? And we went for a walk, Luca and me, and kissed behind the rocks.”

“What age were you?”

“I was fifteen.”

I’ve seen pictures of fifteen-year-old Rafa. Before the muscles, when he was so young and innocent-looking. Somehow it’s easy to imagine him hiding behind the rocks on a beach sweetly kissing an Italian boy. Maybe it wasn’t sweet, maybe it was that awkward kind of teenage fumbling, but if it was then I don’t want to know. “You said when the whole thing with Mery started, you had a boyfriend?”

“Yeah,” says Rafa. “My first serious boyfriend, no? We were together for… I think maybe two and one half years? Something like that. He was the son of one of the business partners in my father’s company.”

“Your parents knew?” 

“Yeah, they knew. Actually, if you mean about me being gay, I think my mother knew before I did. She always knows me.”

The expression on his face in the warm light of the candle on the table is so lovely. Remembering his mother knowing her son like that. I’m glad they made it easy for Rafa to know himself. Not all parents are like that. I lean my chin on my hand. “Have you ever been with anyone on tour?” I ask him. 

“You mean a player?”

“Yeah,” I say. I’m pretty sure there are a good few gay players on tour. Or at least bisexual.

“Only one,” he says. “Guess.” He crosses his arms in front of himself on the table and waits for me to offer a name. I rack my brains but I can’t really think.

“Not…” I guess what’s crossing my mind is pretty gross, but they _were_ close in a kind of tactile way back then. “Not Carlos Moya?”

Rafa roars laughing, throwing his head back, and honestly I feel some relief. “Charlie?” he asks, when he’s stopped guffawing. “Why you think Charlie?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “I guess you always seemed very, you know, touchy-feely when you were on the tour in the early days.”

He shrugs, refilling our wineglasses. “I guess,” he says. “Not that strange for Spanish, no? And I think maybe not that strange for me.”

He’s right about that. Rafa has always been gorgeously tactile. It’s one of the many things that are so great about him. “Okay,” I say. “Then who? One of the Spaniards, I take it.”

He nods. “Yeah, Feli,” he says.

I don’t know what makes my stomach drop when I hear that. “Oh,” I say, trying to ignore the feeling. “Was he your boyfriend?”

Rafa shakes his head. “Fuck buddy,” he says, and the phrase is so incongruous out of his mouth that I can’t help laughing. 

“Fuck buddy,” I echo. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Suddenly the image of them kissing is flooding my brain and I don’t want it. “Feli’s a good guy,” I say, flailing around for something.

“Yeah, good guy,” Rafa says. “He’s now a good friend, no? Wasn’t any drama or nothing like that. Just a thing, then it finish.”

“I see,” I nod. Is the thought of it being casual worse or better? I don’t know. I don’t know why I feel anything about it at all. Feli’s the same age as me, we came up through the tour together. We were never that close but I always liked him. Now this is like a splinter that I can’t quite get at, and I don’t even know how it got there.

“And Santiago, was that drama? He couldn’t take the secrecy anymore, huh?”

Rafa looks at me quizzically. “What are you talking about?” he says to me. We’ve both finished eating so he takes our plates and puts mine on top of his, and pushes them to one side on the long table.

“When he left you, I figured it must have been the pressure of the situation.” 

He’s looking bemused. “He didn’t leave me, Rogi,” he says. “I breaked with him, no?”

I shake my head a little. What had he told me back in the hotel suite? I can’t even remember now. “Oh,” I say, like a dullard, a moment too late.

“Yeah,” he says. “Being honest, I fell out of love with him. No big drama, no, but I think it hurted him. I was sorry to do that. But I had to tell him the truth.” He regards me over the rim of his glass. “Why you think it was the pressure?”

It’s all I can do to shake my head and say, “I don’t know. I guess I just assumed. What stupid fool would leave you for any other reason?”

He smiles. “You think me breaking with him is good enough reason?”

I laugh at myself. “Yeah, I guess,” I say. “But barely.” 

We’re silent for a moment before he looks at me a little teasingly. “You ever kiss a boy, Rogi?” he asks.

I can feel the slight flush in my cheeks. “Actually, no.” He quirks an eyebrow as if he doesn’t believe me. “Seriously. Never,” I say. I don’t know if it’s weird these days, when everyone supposedly experiments as a teenager or whatever, but I really haven’t. I suddenly feel something taut in my chest, like I’ve said the wrong thing, but I don’t know what it was or what I could say to fix it. My head is a little slow, my thoughts syrupy and wine-doused. “So what about Feli?” I ask. “Why was he just a fuck buddy, nothing serious? Wouldn’t it be easier to date someone on the tour?”

He holds up his hand and extends one finger. “One, I didn’t feel that way about him, and I don’t think he feeled that way about me.” That seems absurd, because why wouldn’t anyone fall for him, but I accept that _he_ believes it. He holds up a second finger. “Two, the tour is all gossip, no? Impossible to keep a secret in the locker room. Three,”—one more finger outstretched—“If you break, then you have to see him naked in the locker room every week forever. Bad mistake to get with a guy on tour.”

“I’m impressed, you’ve got your rules all worked out.”

“You’ve got to have rules when you’re gay on tour,” he tells me, like he’s sharing his personal motto. Again, it’s the delivery, I’m telling you. That’s why I laugh so much when I’m with him. 

“Oh, god, Rafa,” I say, wiping the corners of my eyes. “I’m so glad I came here, you know?” It’s a long time since I’ve felt so peaceful. Maybe that’s a terrible thing to say, it probably sounds like being with my family was bad. It wasn’t, that’s not what I mean. It’s just that being here is something I needed in some profound way. “I only got to talk to you that once on Instagram. I kept meaning to say to you we should Skype or something, but I never did. I don’t know why.”

“I wanted to talk to you, too,” he says. His voice is so soft. His face is so sweet. His deep brown eyes look almost black in this light, deep and limpid, reflecting the goodness of his soul. Sometimes Rafa makes me think there must be a god, because how can a person like this be an accident? It’s as if some great creator decided that at last he was ready to produce perfection, and nine months later Rafa was born. 

“It’s gonna suck when we’re retired,” I say. “I’m gonna have to visit you here all the time.” 

The way his face crinkles up when he beams at me is almost too much to bear. “You can stay in your suite, or here in my garden. Anytime you like, Rogi.”

“Maybe you’ll give me a job. I’ll teach the kids.” I said that once in an interview. I remember fiercely meaning it at the time. Honestly, I mean it again now, even though I say it as kind of a joke. He just laughs. I know, it’s kind of a ridiculous idea, Roger Federer settling down as a teacher. I don’t know how I’d do with the routine. Maybe I’ll just come and help out now and then.

It’s getting late and maybe I’m feeling a little sleepy, but I don’t want to go to bed. I don’t want to mooch off to my guesthouse alone. It’s the kind of evening where everything feels perfect, the kind you always wish you could make last for hours and hours. I help him with the plates and dishes, rinsing them off and putting them in his dishwasher, moving around him. It’s like I can _feel_ him close to me. When it’s all done, I lean against the kitchen island. We kept our wineglasses, the last of the bottle drained into them, and we sip the end of it now. “Life is good here,” I say to him. It doesn’t feel like enough to encompass the deep sense of contentment I feel here, but maybe he understands what I mean. “I could retire here. My kids could go to your school. I bet they’d love it here.” 

The thing about Rafa is that he listens, you know? He really hears things, maybe things sometimes people don’t actually say, because quietly, calmly, he takes my wineglass and puts it on the counter beside his. Then he takes my face in his hands, which for some reason doesn’t seem shocking to me, it seems good, it seems _amazing_ , and he says, “Roger, I would love that.”

It’s so simple. That touch, those words. I kiss him.

Something clicks inside me, and I feel of _course_ I’m kissing him, of _course_ this is what it’s all been leading towards. I want to press against him like this forever, tasting him, touching him. It’s an explosion of touch, an ignition of something powerful, because before I know it I’ve got him pushed against the fridge and I’m kissing his neck, his jaw, his mouth, and everything again. The line of his collarbones makes me groan. The sound of his breath in my ear makes me feel powerless. Yes, yes, I hear the tiny voice inside me telling me there’s more to think of here, but I don’t listen. I _can’t_ listen. Not when I have him like this, right here, right now.

“Rogi,” he whispers, kissing that spot on my neck that makes my knees weak. “I want you.” Like a secret, like this hasn’t become desperately obvious.

“I want you, too,” I reply, which I know he can already tell, the way he’s pushing against me. 

He takes my hand and pulls me upstairs, a kind of urgency between us, and I’m not scared. Whatever happens, I’m not scared of sex with him, which maybe you would think, given that I’ve never even kissed with a man before. That doesn’t mean I haven’t experimented. I push those thoughts out of my mind, though, because I can’t let anything in but here and now. We’re naked on his bed, and I’m whimpering because it feels so good. I’m on my back but I want to fuck him so I turn us over, still face to face. “What do you like?” I ask him. It’s hard to keep my mouth off him. “Like this?” He opens his legs so my hips slot between his thighs and I swear, I _swear_ to you, this is heaven.

The rest is a blur. I know I fuck up with the first condom, my hands are actually shaking, and he grins at me and opens a second one and rolls it on me. I bite his jaw and he laughs a little, and that’s how it goes, close breaths and smiles and his body, so fucking perfect and tight. There’s one time when I think I’m trembling right from my core, trying not to go too hard too soon, when he whispers to me that it’s fine, we’ve got all night, we’ve got all the time we want, and I let go and I come so hard, and he does too, his come everywhere all over both of us. I collapse on him and he can take my weight, he holds me with his arms like iron bands around me, not letting me go anywhere.

“You know how long I wait to do that?” he whispers in my ear. I shake my head and grunt a little. “ _Years_ ,” he says, emphasising the word, letting me know how long it’s been.

I push myself up so I’m leaning my head on my hand and I can look down at him. “I think I knew that,” I say. “Not clearly, but I think…” It’s only hitting me know, to be honest. “I think I wanted it, too.” I think that’s true. I’m pretty sure it is. I feel like I’ve wanted him forever.

He kisses me again and then he slips out of bed and goes to the bathroom, coming back with a cloth that he uses to clean me up. He’s already clean, glistening with water. “You’re so hot,” I tell him.

“You’re sexy,” he tells me. With grin at each other like idiots, and then I laugh again, and he gives a kind of longsuffering sigh, teasing me, and pads back to the bathroom with the cloth. By the time he comes back I’ve calmed down a little. He turns off the lamps beside the bed and curls in against me. I want to wrap myself around him and keep him close to me forever. I kiss him again, softly. 

“You’re beautiful,” I whisper to him. He presses his face against my chest, and even though it’s dark I know he’s probably blushing in that gorgeous, sweet way he has. 

“Don’t leave my bed for the rest of the time you are here,” he says, quietly, wrapping his arm right around me and pushing one of his legs between mine.

“Okay,” I whisper. “Except for the boat. You said you’d take me.”

He breathes out a laugh. “Except for the boat,” he agrees.

I know there are things to deal with. I know. But I think now that there have always been things to deal with, there’s always been this, you know. Always him. And this time, this space and quietude we’ve carved out for ourselves, this is where we can figure it out. Just for a little while, just us, together. Me and him.


End file.
